News Release
#4

By A.
Writer

Press releases are available from a
wide variety of sources. They provide an excellent source for
quality content and can be edited to meet your particular
requirements.

For some niches you will find an
abundance of free press releases available. This is
particularly true of the technology industry, but many other
market places also generate significant volumes of
news.

Sometimes you will find press
releases on individual company sites, other times you may find
an industry body that distributes news releases to all
appropriate parties, and usually they will make them freely
available on their web site.

Usually news releases come in a
format that allows you to edit them. This can be particularly
useful if you want to include some of your chosen keywords and
phrases. Obviously, it is not ethical to change the meaning of
the press release by adding inappropriate words and phrases,
but it is fine if the words and phrases you add do not change
the press release to the point where it is no longer
accurate.

In addition to using other people's
news releases you can also generate your own. These can be used
on your own site and also distributed to third parties via
services such as prweb.com.

One important point to note is that
news, being time-sensitive, can 'date' your site very quickly
so it's important not to place too much emphasis on the
timings/dates unless you are prepared to commit to refreshing
this part of your site regularly. For example, if you were to
publish a page on your web site entitled "Today's News" and the
date of the release was six months earlier, visitors to your
site would draw obvious conclusions about the freshness (and
overall quality) of your site.

Having mentioned time-sensitivity
above, it is not true that you can't feature older news items.
If you start to accumulate a lot of older or out-of-date news
items you may wish to feature them in a 'News Archive' section
of your site. You could split your releases into sets of
sub-pages, grouped by month, with a parent page for each month.
This allows you to recycle your old news content into a
longer-lasting section of your site, with very little
effort.